DAILY DIGEST

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, February 17, 2005

PG&E to pay dividend again after a 4-year hiatus

For the first time since the energy crisis, PG&E Corp. will pay its shareholders a dividend this spring.

The San Francisco energy company said Wednesday that it will pay holders of its common stock 30 cents per share on April 15. The company, whose stock was once a staple of retirement accounts, last paid a dividend in October 2000, at the height of California's power crisis. Six months later, the firm's electrical utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., filed for bankruptcy.

PG&E executives said in the fall that they planned to restart dividends in April, saying the payments would mark an important milestone in the company's return to financial health.

The amount per share is the same as the last dividend PG&E paid in 2000 and is slightly higher than the dividends of California's two other investor- owned utilities, both of whose parent companies pay stockholders 25 cents per share.

-- David R. Baker

100 tech workers lose jobs at Gap

Gap Inc. this week cut 100 information-technology jobs from its San Francisco headquarters, its offices in San Bruno and a call center in Rocklin (Placer County) in a departmental reorganization, the company said Wednesday.

The cuts represented a small percentage of the total IT staff, spokeswoman Kris Marubio said. The company has 5,000 employees in its San Francisco and San Bruno offices combined and about 150,000 employees companywide.

Last month, the retailer eliminated about 60 U.S. merchandising positions, moving them to countries in Europe and Asia. Some U.S. workers will transfer overseas to fill the jobs, Marubio said.

Last week, Gap said it plans to close a Maryland distribution center employing 170 people and shift the work to larger facilities in New York and Tennessee.

The job cuts are unrelated, and the company is growing in other areas, Marubio said.

-- Jenny Strasburg

Former network chief indicted in San Jose

A San Jose man was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday on charges that he illegally gained access to his former employer's computer system to read e-mail, delete a Web page and cause e-mail to be rejected.

Roman Meydbray, 27, the former network manager of Creative Explosions Inc. , a Scotts Valley software company, was named in an indictment handed down by a federal grand jury in San Jose.

He was charged with two counts of unlawful access to stored communications and one count each of intentionally causing damage to a computer and unauthorized access to a computer, recklessly causing damage.

Federal prosecutors said Meydbray deleted a Web page for Creative Explosions, changed passwords on e-mail accounts, read the company president's e-mail and made configuration changes to e-mail servers that caused e-mail to be rejected. The crimes occurred less than two weeks after the company terminated his employment in November 2003, authorities said.